India expects ‘substantial’ results from Xi visit

NEW DELHI : Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said Monday that India expected “substantial” results from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden visit to New Delhi later this month while classifying Beijing as a competitor.

“Our relationship with China is of cooperation and competition,” Swaraj told reporters in New Delhi. “The outcome of the visit will be substantial and solid.”

Although there was no announcement on the date of Xi’s visit, Indian foreign ministry officials confirmed it was expected before he and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi head to the UN General Assembly in New York at the end of the month.

Beijing sent its Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Delhi in June soon after the right-wing Modi’s landslide election victory, delivering a message that India and China were “natural partners”.

After meeting Xi at a summit of the BRICS emerging economic powers in Brazil in July, Modi called for increased Chinese investment in India.

However relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours are still dogged by mutual suspicion, in large part as a legacy of a brief but bloody war in 1962 over the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern Himalayas that China also claims as its own.